Another man identified as Majid called it “cheap and extremely inappropriate”. A third said it was “disgusting”….

Under Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Sharia, women are barred from obtaining driving licences and those who flout the ban are jailed. All female citizens are subject to a crushing guardianship system that obliges them to seek permission from male relatives to do everything from opening a bank account to travelling.

I was comforting a friend the other day. Our conversation got me thinking of my father. Dad was born in 1925, and joined the Navy before he even turned 18. To join, he had to track down a wayward parent to sign his enlistment papers. His father being well hidden in the Idaho woods, he found his mother under the glowering, rain-soaked pines of Northern Oregon. His enlistment would take him to the Pacific Theater, where he would sail on fast, fragile PT boats and spend his time ashore climbing coconut palms.

Shig Murao should be a national hero. He sold Ginsberg’s “Howl” to an undercover cop and was arrested for obscenity. He was born in Seattle in 1926. He had a twin sister. Both were sent to Idaho during the war to hide their tan faces under blue pine. They huddled there all throughout the long winter of the early 1940s, released only by the radiant nuclear sun.

My father hated the internment. He said it was the greatest stain on our nations honor since the Confederacy. He defended the bombs, since they saved lives. Both of his comrades, stuck in torturous Japanese POW camps, but also the lives of GIs and Japanese soldiers and civilians. Downfall and Coronet would have seen millions slaughtered. Young men, ink still wet on their enlistment papers, blown up by grenades delivered by uncomprehending school children. Or young Japanese women shot down by scarred Marines because they couldn’t take the risk of what they hid beneath their kimonos. Two bright flashes and a few hundred thousand. That my father understood with his heavy, serious brow. But not the internment.

Shig was saved by a flash of judicial sanity. Nine minds, not justices but literary critics testified in his defense. Society was redeemed for angel headed hipsters and honest store clerks. After his time locked in Magic Valley, to again walk free down Broadway to the Embarcadero must have felt like victory over an implacable enemy.

After the war, my father worked with men who had been POWs. They’d known the death marches and the certainty that they would be executed. And yet one morning they awoke to empty guard towers and open gates. That bright, nuclear morning after the surrender.

I wonder what conversations my father and Shig could have had. A tepid Cold Warrior, who built a career out of mines and missile silos, and a radicalized book store clerk. I imagine them drinking coffee in the Sunset, looking out over the Pacific, quietly toasting Shig’s freedom as the nuclear sun sinks into the ocean.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Crassus the past few days. Crassus, the wealthy, vain Consul of Rome, who took command of a campaign against the Syrians.

It was long odds that Crassus would ever rise up to command Roman legions. After all, despite being generally successful in life, he courted controversy, being accused at one point even of deflowering one of the Vestals. Though lust was hardly the only wickedness in him. Plutarch says of him:

“[Some] say there was but that only vice of covetousness in Crassus, that drowned many other goodly virtues in him; for mine own opinion, methinks he could not be touched with that vice alone without others, since it grew so great as the note of that only did hide and cover all his other vices.”2

As I mentioned, it was highly unexpected that Crassus came to the office of Consul and to lead Roman forces against the Parthians in Syria. After all, his father was only censor of Rome and no doubt left him with only a modest fortune. By the end of his life, however, Crassus’ covetousness and acumen had left him with such great wealth that he didn’t even himself know its magnitude until he ordered it counted shortly before he left on Campaign.

Throughout his life Crassus cleaved himself to those in power. Indeed, he ended up a great booster and ally of Pompey, with whom he was made consul. He curried favor with the great people of Rome and used his access to them to increase not only his wealth, but his power as well.

But the thing that Crassus coveted most of all was the great honors that came to those who brought military victory to Rome. He yearned for a Triumph in honor of a great victory to cement his legacy. Again, from Plutarch:

“…being among his friends and familiars, he would give out such fond boasts of it as no young man could have made… [He], forgetting himself too much, had such fond conceits in his head, as he not only hoped after the conquest of Syria and of the Parthians, but flattered himself that the would should see all that Lucullus had done against King Tigranes and Pompey against King Mithridates, were but trifles…to what he intended.”

And so, he set off on his grand campaign, with little military experience to his name (he’d had a hand in quelling a slave uprising by a hot-headed Socialist firebrand called Spartacus), and nothing but his riches and connections to preserve him.

Finding himself in unfamiliar territory, Crassus enlisted the help of a local mercenary captain named Ariamnes, feeling that an expert guide would help him make his way safely through the unfamiliar territory of the Syrian campaign. Little did he know that Ariamnes was already in the employ of the Parthians. Ariamnes advised Crassus to make haste and rush towards the center of Parthian territory, since surely the enemy armies were in fast retreat in front of the might of Crassus’ legions.

This flattered Crassus’ vanities and notion of how the campaign was meant to play out, and so when Crassus’ commanders urged caution and suspicion he ignored them and marched the armies forward.

And so into the hot, howling Syrian desert Crassus marched his ten legions. Fifty thousand men in full armor, with weapons and supplies. The wind scraped at their faces, and the heat sapped their strength. Ariamnes, still stringing Crassus along by his vanities, lead him further and further into inhospitable territory. Saying to him always, “the Parthians are just ahead, we nearly have them”.

Until, one morning, Ariamnes was gone.

And the Parthians had arrived.

The Parthians arrayed themselves in loose formation and began to harrass the exhausted Romans. The Parthians fought from horseback, armed with powerful bows. Their mobility and long years of training in the saddle allowed them to pick at all parts of the Roman lines without the need even of ever surrounding them. They resupplied themselves from nearby towns and villages in waves, allowing them to wear down the already weary Romans for days at a time, nearly non-stop.

Crassus, out maneuvered by the Parthians, fell back on the one kind of strategy he knew. The rigid, disciplined strategy that had won against an army of rebellious slaves. He arrayed his men in formation, had them form themselves into a tortoise of shields, with javelins thrown occasionally from the rear, and attempted to march on the Parthian lines.

But there were no Parthian lines. Only a swirling stream of skilled horse archers and the hiss of incoming arrows.

In the scorching Syrian sun, with only small respites, the Parthians harried the Romans slowly to death. Their powerful arrows pinning legionnaire’s shields to their arms, the legs of the commanders to their horses.

Crassus continued to mount infantry charges and to refight the battle against Spartacus. His men died slowly, over days. Those not killed by arrows outright, succumbed to their wounds or were baked alive in their armor by the desert sun.

In the end, Crassus was overwhelmed. His troops stood at last on the crest of a narrow hill, and were taken from several sides by a last charge. Crassus was struck down, his troops routed. Tens of thousands of men were butchered. Some smaller number were taken captive and sold as slaves.

Crassus had no Triumph in Rome. His grand achievement ended with a river of blood in the Syrian sand, its wellspring the proud heart of an incompetent man who mistook adoration for honor, wealth for competence, and high office for unstoppable destiny.

1 I have taken liberties with the scholarship in the following piece. This is not a thesis, but a parable.

2 All quotes from Plutarch here are from Sir Thomas North’s translation.

RESTRICTES: Yes, Openo, I am troubled. This migrant crisis in Europe has reawakened my concerns about immigration to the West in general. While I’m sympathetic to the plight of those fleeing civil war (though not to economic migrants), I think that Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic are being extremely foolish and letting sentiment and blank slate ideology blind them to the long term, irreversible consequences of their decisions.

OPENO: Then we have very different attitudes. My “sentiment” leads me to believe that the migration from poorer to richer countries will – despite the difficulties associated with any large change – be in the end a great benefit not only to the immigrants and their descendants, but to the host nations as well. Perhaps we can use reason and evidence to bridge this gulf between us. Can you elaborate on your position more?

“If we’re unhappy with the presidency we’ve got, [political scientist Theodore J. Lowi] suggests, we have ourselves to blame. The office as we know it is largely the creature of public demands. And like the transformed presidential role it reflects, the exultant rhetoric of the modern presidency is as much curse as blessing. It raises expectations for the office– expectations that were extraordinarily high to begin with. A man who trumpets his ability to protect Americans from economic dislocation, to shield them from physical harm and moral decay, and to lead them to national glory– such a man is bound to disappoint. Yet, having promised much, he’ll seek the power to deliver on his promises.” – Gene Healy, The Cult of the Presidency

“Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government’s claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA’s own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition, but also surveillance competition: when someone buys a Chinese device instead of an American one, the NSA loses a crucial means of spying on a great many communication activities.” – Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U. S. Surveillance State

“Napoleon made the point when discussing the outcome of actions between his own cavalry and the Mameluke horsemen of Asia Minor. These horsemen were so good that two of them would defeat three of his cavalrymen in a minor skirmish. But in a major battle, 1,000 of his cavalry would defeat 1,500 Mamelukes. On the small scale, horsemanship was the predominant factor, but on the large scale victory would be won by the controlled and disciplined application of force. Wellington made much the same point regarding actions between his cavalry and their French opponents.

On both scales of operation skilled horsemanship and cooperative action were ingredient factors, but the balance of importance between them changed with scale. Similarly, in intelligence personal skill may be the paramount factor on the small scale, but the ability to coordinate the skills of many individuals may be predominant in large-scale operations.” – RV Jones

Magic Blue Smoke

House Rules:

1.) Carry out your own dead.
2.) No opium smoking in the elevators.
3.) In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.
4.) A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place.
4a.) Penalty one stroke.
5.) Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.
6.) Keep Calm and Kill It with Fire.
7.) Spammers will be fed to the Crabipede.